[mdlug] Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone by Adapteva — Kickstarter

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 16:23 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Garry Stahl wrote:
> >> On 10/10/2012 05:31 PM, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> >>> Very true.  Most GUI stuff is a complete waste of storage space,
> >>> in-core memory, cache space, and clock cycles.
> >> Except the Amiga is a GUI system.  An elegantly programed efficient,
> >> multi-processor GUI system.
> > Exactly.  There wasn't room for bloat.
> > I'm constantly frustrated that although CPUs have sped up by
> > a factor of 3000 since when I learned to program in high school,
> > apps aren't running any faster.
> > The Amiga code was written to run on hardware that ran at
> > only 1% of the speed of current off-the-shelf hardware.
> Understand that the CPU capacity is being spent to improve development
> speed, rather than end-user functionality speed. 

I just do not believe in this
apps-do-the-same-stuff-but-need-more-resources narrative.   Yes, I could
write a school paper on GeoWorks on my Commodore 128 - and performance
was actually really good.  But saving and loading it took a long time.
And the fonts weren't kerned.  And once I move beyond a letter to my
friend.... there is no way I could do then what I do now in LibreOffice.
A 100+ page document?  Forget it.  Multiple linked documents with a
master table of contents and appendix?  Forget it.  Embedded diagrams
and images - maybe a few, of *much* lower resolution and complexity.
Compose multiple documents into a 400+ page master document?  Forget
it.  

Open a 2048x1024 true-color image for editing on my Commodore 128?  No
way.  Supporting all 50+ types of image formats?  Nope.

The capabilities of GeoCalc vs. LibreOffice Calc?  That isn't even a
comparison.

Not to mention the pile of integration that occurs on a modern desktop,
with interoperability between multiple applications.  Way beyond
cut-n-paste.  All my apps know if I have a network connection or not.
They can all access a shared keyring and secrets database.

And of course "security" on the Amiga or C-128?  None.

Try doing any encryption or decryption on that era of CPU... you'll be
there all day.  And whenever you use https:// you are encrypting and
decrypting megabytes of traffic.

That all these 'extras' aren't really apparent just indicates how
successful they are and how well they work.

> Yes, a programmer with the mindset of a 1980s assembly coder could
> achieve absolutely amazing performance on a modern system, 

He could.  But I really, seriously, do not believe he could create a
compelling application.  He'd have to write *tons* of code to work in a
modern environment.

> All that 'bloat' is really a set of tools designed to allow

Assuming it really is "bloat" and not functionality I really want.  If
someone is using a computer the same way for the same purpose they did
in 1984 - then yes, it is all bloat.

> programmers to get useful products to end-users in a timely fashion.
> Without it, the computing world would look much as it did in the early
> 1980s; development would be limited to hobbyists and dev shops running
> their own code on timeshare systems with services rented out to
> customers.

err... you mean they'd be using a "cloud"? :)

> The modern picture is much, much nicer and cheaper.

Yep.